Living In America Raw -

At work, you’re expected to reply to Slack messages at 10 p.m. because “we’re a family.” Your boss talks about mental health awareness while denying your PTO. You smile. You cash the check. Half of it goes to health insurance you’re terrified to use because the deductible is a used Honda Civic.

The grocery store has 47 kinds of peanut butter but no fresh vegetables within five miles of your zip code. You eat frozen pizza in the car before driving home so you don’t have to cook. Your phone buzzes: a news alert about another school shooting, another climate record broken, another CEO making 300x your salary. You swipe it away. You have to be up at 5:30. living in america raw

Friday night you sit on a cracked curb drinking a tallboy. The sky is orange from wildfire smoke or sunset — doesn’t matter. A neighbor blasts reggaeton. Another screams at their kid. Sirens wail three blocks over. You think: this is it. The grind. The dream. The raw fucking nerve of it all. At work, you’re expected to reply to Slack

That’s America. Glorious. Brutal. Unmedicated. And somehow, still moving. You cash the check

The highway is a religion. You spend three hours of your life each day sandwiched between a lifted truck with a Punisher sticker and a Tesla whose driver is watching TikTok at 80 mph. Road rage is the only real meditation left. You flip someone off, then feel nothing.

You wake up to the hum of the AC fighting 95-degree humidity or the radiator clanking in a studio you pay $1,800 for because it has "exposed brick." The coffee is burnt, but you drink it black because the oat milk latte is $7. You scroll past a GoFundMe for your coworker’s appendix surgery.